Meet the JPMorgan Chase whistleblower who explains how the bank helped to wreck the economy — and then got away with it.

"It’s a crazy thing when the leading law enforcement official of the nation comes out and says that some companies are just so big that we can’t prosecute them no matter what they do,” says journalist Matt Taibbi, who featured Alayne Fleischmann in his latest Rolling Stone article.

“This become the unofficial official policy of the Justice Department. And this greatly affected how they dealt with companies like JPMorgan Chase, CitiGroup, and Bank of America."

22 min - you couldn't get access to info.. (elizabeth holmes ness)

Ideological fundamentalism is dangerous, but even more so when it appears in universities, especially among the lefthttp://t.co/j3F6b1l7yg

"If we work in the APECO factories, we work for a boss. In our ancestral land, there is no boss…. Everything we need to survive is here. If we nurture our forest and seas, it will sustain our needs. The life of the tribe is simple. We are able to eat everyday. Our huts are small but we are happy."

Ultimately Vic makes us wonder about the big questions at the heart of this story: What is progress? Who defines it? And who really benefits from "development" projects?

Jain: There's a saying that the white man who brought pencils also brought erasers with him.

So she and Nelson decided to embed with their subjects. In 1995, while teaching at Rutgers University, Edin, Nelson, and their three-year-old daughter moved into a studio apartment near 36th and Westfield in Camden, one of the poorest cities in America. It was the beginning of two years of intensive fieldwork, followed by another five years of interviewing—or, as Edin puts it, "a rich opportunity for learning. Some social scientists will rent an office building and bring people in and interview them. But experiencing what other people are experiencing while you're studying them is just critical."

Trauma made the kids "very vigilant," she says. "They notice everything about you."

Edin says her willingness to put up with the same routine annoyances as her neighbors helped persuade them to open up. "Lots of people said, 'We know you're the real thing. You're not here just to study us, because you live here, too.'"

"It's just an expectation of maturity that middle-class parents do not expect their kids to have," she says. "When you're poor and you're a single mom, you have to raise your kids to be tougher and more savvy sooner."

asked what she was learning from her students. "Everyone cheats," she said. Jencks perked up and said, "Can you prove it?"

Edin spent the next six years taking a deep dive into welfare home economics, pestering poor mothers in Chicago, Boston, San Antonio, and Charleston about how they managed to survive on benefits that averaged $370 a month. In 1997, she published her findings in a book called Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. It came on the heels of the Clinton-era welfare reform that overhauled the entitlement system to force single mothers into the workplace.

They didn't get legal jobs because of a straightforward economic calculus: Low wages drained by child care, transportation, and other expenses would have left them poorer than they were on welfare.

Jencks says that Edin's work also represented a "methodological innovation." Rather than obsessing about getting a perfect sample for her study, he says, "she figured out that it was really better to get interviews and observations of people who were willing to trust you and would tell you the truth than it was to get interviews of people who were a random sample of the population who'd lie to you. That came as something of a shock to social scientists. The question of whether people were telling the truth had sort of slipped away."

yes. that. exactly. youth, et al, as token.

This, Edin found, was why low-income women were willing to decouple childbearing from marriage: They believed if they waited until everything was perfect, they might never have children. And children, says Edin, are "the thing in life you can't live without." As one subject explained, "I don't wanna have a big trail of divorce, you know. I'd rather say, 'Yes, I had my kids out of wedlock' than say, 'I married this idiot.' It's like a pridething."

Before I can ask him a question, Edin jumps in, and I get a look at her technique in real time. She interrogates White, leaning forward with her blue eyes trained on him, hanging on his every word.

the experience reinforced his sense that the welfare system "discourages a lot of guys from wanting to do the right thing.

"These men have a tremendous amount to contribute if we can just find a way."

Edin, for her part, is on to another project. This one involves scouring the streets of Cleveland alongside Nelson, on a pair of purple cruiser bikes, to find the growing population of Americans living on less than $2 a day—"a third-world measure of poverty in first-world America," Edin says.

Nelson and Edin marvel at how little policymakers know about the economic realities that poor people face.

This is one reason why "people have been lulled into complacency thinking poverty is solved." With the new book, Edin says, "we're hoping to stoke the American conscience. These people are not a dependent class. They're trying to do the right thing."

hello.

you blog holds my latest finds/thoughts/ramblings. not intended for normal edu-blogger consumption or modeling.lookdirectly below for our collection of more orderly-random (chaordic) thinking... if you are so inclined...